“Statues of historical ‘old white men’ such as Lord Nelson and the Duke of Wellington could be removed from public view in Wales in order to ‘set right the historical narrative’ and prevent offence to a ‘diverse modern public’.”
[Daily Mail, quoting Daily Telegraph].
At what point do we start to deal directly with the enemies in our midst?
Quite apart from the very important free speech issue, anyone who has had to report a real crime to the UK police knows how useless they are, most of the time.
Tweets seen
⚡️Notable Russian sources, including those close to Wagner, report that the armed forces of Ukraine have a large strike group made up of up to 10 brigades currently in Chasiv Yar, preparing to conduct a wide counterattack in the Bakhmut direction.
“Sargon of Akkad” (Carl Benjamin) once again proving that he is a waste of space.
2/2 There's a lot of that in WWII history, where truth is opposite of what we assume. Naturally, we're biased to our own side, but if people knew more about Churchill's conduct of the War, particularly his unnecessary escalation and prolonging of it, he would not be such the hero
If I am not mistaken, that building was and is not far from where I used to live in Little Venice, West London. It is (I think) either in nearby Maida Vale or St. John’s Wood. I have certainly seen it before.
Ah, just looked it up. St. John’s Wood area. There are a number of other very similar mansion-flat buildings in that part of London.
5) If the BBC wants controls on presenters they have to be more explicit 6) Mr Blobby could present MOTD and people would still watch 7) The quality of analysis is pisspoor compared with YouTube 8) Tim Davie has no credibility left 9) Suspect he and Lineker both gone in a year
Oh and one last one: 10) Most people on Twitter took sides and argued the exact opposite of what they usually argue (free speech/cancelling) based on their views of Lineker
I agree with most if not all of that. I have given my views on the Lineker storm-in-a-teacup already. My main problem with him as BBC presenter is his absurdly inflated remuneration (somewhere approaching £2M a year). Otherwise, though of course I despise his views and his hypocrisy, he is no different to hundreds or thousands of idiots on Twitter.
As Shipman has tweeted, the views of BBC staff (at least the highly-paid presenters etc) are at odds with the majority of the British people; and as he also tweets, by implication, this is not a “debate” but a war, and the BBC types are on the other side to that of the British people. Enemies of the people.
It’s double the number on the other side and there is a majority who thinks it damaging in 75% of seats. See recent research by JL Partners for Onward cited in my piece at the weekend
Note that other tweeter. Ex-ambassador. The FCO, like the BBC, is also riddled with (in the lay sense) traitors to our future, speaking ideologically; persons who want this country swamped even more.
The tweeter was H.M. Ambassador to Cuba at one time.
That Guardian report on Cuba is well worth reading. The self-describing “Left” in the UK would do well to read it, and be reminded how old-style socialism (effectively dead after 1989 in most of the world) failed and (where it still exists) still fails, especially where the population is mainly non-white. Even Che Guevara saw that:
Another point is that, while apologists for Cuba and the late Fidel Castro always point out what a good health service Cuba has (supposedly), health is, before anything else, an outcome of clean air and water, decent living conditions, healthy food and drink, modest exercise, and absence of negative factors such as excessive alcohol, and/or drug abuse.
A health service is something to fill in where the above factors have failed.
Once again, the police, faced with real everyday crime, are proven lazy, uncaring, and in fact useless.
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On the plus side, unlike much of Monroe's recent advice ("you can eat mouldy yoghurt as yoghurt is basically mould anyway" / "sure you can use plastic explosive to open a can of Big Soup"), at least that coffee won't kill you.
There are so many now making a living online and even partly offline by simply pretending to be “activists” of various kinds. “Jack Monroe”, Julia Grace Patterson, the part-Jew calling himself “Russ in Cheshire”, some other Jew in Essex, that Nigerian waste of space called “Femi”; the dull “anti-Tory” blonde calling herself “Supertanskiii”. Others too. “Griftocracy”?
SNP in freefall: Support for Scottish independence dramatically COLLAPSES following Sturgeon's resignationhttps://t.co/ak45lc4ZzX
Interesting. Of course, the SNP may still be able to keep going as a, perhaps the, major party in Scotland even if “Independence” becomes just a stuffed animal under glass, to be revered or looked at, but without hope that it might revive.
The SNP may have 45 out of 59 Scottish MPs in the House of Commons, but only 64 out of 129 MSPs in the Scottish Parliament, and a mere 453 councillors out of 1,227 in local councils.
Now that the SNP is fairly well entrenched in Scotland, it may decline a little, but I cannot see any immediate collapse of the SNP vote.
'This one really is large. Junior doctors make up 40 per cent of the NHS medical workforce.'
GB News' Jeff Moody reports as junior doctors begin three days of strike action over pay and working conditions. pic.twitter.com/iRKNplkO6Q
I have just read that “A junior doctor in their first year as a foundation doctor will receive basic pay of just under £29,400, with earnings typically rising to almost £37,000 after taking into account payments for extra duties. Second-year doctors earn an average of £43,300.” Not a fortune but, after all, that is just in the first 1-2 years. Some more senior doctors —consultants and GPs— make hundreds of thousands of pounds. The junior doctors do progress incrementally and may even hit those six-figure salary heights before too many years have past.
I suspect that the medical profession (generally) is squandering its credit with the British people, just as the police, MPs, NHS generally, and BBC (among many other groups) have already done.
Putin 'killing Russian elite' to cling to power as 39 oligarchs and officials mysteriously diehttps://t.co/XbH5BmMuAM
[Lenin, Krupskaya, and others, in Lenin’s requisitioned or expropriated Rolls-Royce]
I wonder whether there will be an even bigger parade than usual in Moscow today, the 105th anniversary of the October Revolution of 1917 (in reality, the Bolshevik seizure of power from the Provisional Government headed by Kerensky). The Julian calendar was in use at the time.
The war in Ukraine is now going badly. I expect attacks on Kiev-regime infrastructure behind the front lines to continue and to intensify
It may be that the main dam on the Dnieper (a major Stalin-era project of the 1930s, rebuilt in the late 1940s after having been blown up by retreating Soviet forces in 1941) will be destroyed again.
If the Russian forces were to try to destroy the dam today, they would probably use a tactical nuclear weapon. The last photograph shows clearly how massive is the structure.
In the words of Jack Monroe, "You're fucked, sunshine". Still, I'm sure her fans will do all the mental gymnastics to defend her and call the timeline "libel" and that's all she really needs, isn't it, to keep the machine going. It can take years to leave a cult, I suppose. https://t.co/YnsprZOXSb
This Jack schtick pisses me off. I followed her on WordPress when she posted her early recipes and, having been poor and homeless, always found her emotive melodrama just wasn't something in my gut that felt real. A posh girl hugely exaggerating a small taste of ordinary life.
This exactly – her 'talent' is selling a story to the gullible and vulnerable and she's made a huge amount of money from pleading poor and threatening anyone who challenges her
The fact that msm “journalist”-scribblers have almost all swallowed the “Jack Monroe” “legend” whole, completely uncritically, and without bothering to dig a bit to see whether some or all of it might be untrue, says a lot about the state of the UK mass media today.
I was very much in favour of the “Bootstrap Cook” at first, years ago, but less so later, and now think that she has many serious questions to answer.
The fact that so many mainstream journalistic and “media folk” idiots seem to be actually emotionally invested in supporting her on Twitter makes me even more suspicious (I think that that the mugs who are actually still donating money to her monthly are probably a different set of mugs, for the most part; some seem to be real poor people, living on small State benefits, judging by those who have been saying on Twitter etc that “Jack Monroe” has not supplied the goods that she said she would supply).
I have no idea whether “Jack Monroe” (her name was changed by deed poll from the original Melissa Hadjicostas, she being half Greek-Cypriot) makes £3,000 a month, £8,000 or —as some on Twitter etc claim— about £16,000 a month, but her Patreon donation page alone (at exact time of writing today) shows 663 “patrons”, down from well over 800 a few months ago but still impressive. The lowest level of support is £3.50 per month.
663 x £3.50 = £2,320.50. Not a bad “little earner”, even at that level, to use the estuarine Essex argot.
The highest shown level of support (it was £44 per month until recently!) is now £10 per month. 663 x £10 = £6,630 per month.
It seems reasonable to conclude, therefore, that “Jack Monroe” is getting between £2,320 and £6,630 in cash, monthly, from Patreon alone (minus whatever fees or commissions are charged by the website).
Taxfree too, unless I am mistaken as to whether such donations are counted by HMRC as gifts or not.
The “Bootstrap Cook” also makes money from personal appearances, speaking engagements, TV appearances and, of course, book royalties from her 7 books, most if not all of which are still in print. From what I have read, at least £90,000 (in toto) in royalties over the past several years, and still rolling in.
One could say, “well, so what? She has the right to make money“, but if there are questions around the veracity of what she has said about her own life-story, if there are questions around her asking for money constantly, if there are questions about where monies have disappeared (if indeed they have) and if some of those monies were given by members of the public to be sent to charities, then the questions demand an answer.
For example, in May 2022, Jack Monroe was supposed to be intending to sue both Lee Anderson MP and the “controlled opposition” politico, Martin Daubney, in defamation. Monies were crowdfunded for that purpose, but so far (six months later) no writ has been issued, as far as I know. In fact, none of the usual pre-trial and pre-issue correspondence has occurred, as Lee Anderson said only last week.
I begin to wonder whether the Fraud Squad or similar should take an interest in all this. At least that might straighten out the facts.
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Q: Describe Twitter to someone who has never used it.
Looks as though the pack of pseudonymous Jew trolls on UK Twitter are on the way out, and (so to speak) living on borrowed time…
Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation and we did everything we could to appease the activists.
Extremely messed up! They’re trying to destroy free speech in America.
Cuba looks better in that film than it is today, literally falling to pieces (houses in Havana collapsing after 63 years without maintenance, and the railways scarcely rolling).
There were a few positive aspects to Castro-ite socialism, but not many.
Another factor is that the Cuba of today has relatively fewer white and mestizo people as against blacks. Many went to the wall after 1959, and many others fled to the USA, the Dominican Republic etc.
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Will the Democrats take a drubbing at the US midterm elections on Tuesday?
As for that Holden cretin, just dump him in mid-Channel.
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The Conservative Party is actively destroying itself – full scale abandonment of values, member & voters. Why?? Is it because they know that sovereign democracy is over, to be replaced by a new 1 world government advised by NGOs with power flowing down to unelected technocrats.
Look at this prize idiot (below)! One “Natalie”, defending the “Bootstrap Cook” even though she then admits that she knows nothing at all about the allegations against “Jack Monroe”, or the questions raised:
Some of us want people who are in the public eye selling a false narrative to be exposed, especially so if they're making money from those lies. I'm glad people like Molly exist.
All I’ve ever seen is her putting cheap dinner ideas up and tips on how to keep the cost of food shopping down. I don’t know anything about subscribers or asking for money
All the people that have contributed (myself included) believing she was on the verge of homelessness. Subscribers more so, not getting the content they were promised for bs reasons.
Are you a grifter just like her? Do you look up to a scammer as your role model? What exactly is it about Jack Monroe that makes you want to put yourself out there looking like a right idiot infront of every sane person that sees through her scamming?
So you know nothing about what she's been doing, and therefore you think nothing is happening as a result of your own ignorance. GTF honestly pic.twitter.com/f0HuTRWrQo
To be fair, every time Jack Monroe tweets or posts anything about herself, "which is A LOT) it only takes a second or two to compare it to one of her many other previous wild claims to find the contradictions.
That was the end of the exchange(s). Thick “Natalie” goes away without a parting word. I wonder whether she is now less ignorant.
Twitter, the home of many proudly ignorant, but absolutely sure of their politically-correct rectitude.
F.E. Smith once replied to a judge, who had said that he had listened to Counsel for an hour and was “none the wiser“, “No, my Lord, but you are much better informed“…
What strikes me about the above is not only how gullible people can be but also how defensive, once their minds have accepted, uncritically, a certain narrative, a narrative about which they know absolutely nothing.
Not only the alleged quasi-fraud by “Bootstrap Cook”, but other narratives— “Covid”, Covid “vaccines”, “Ukraine”, the 2010-2020 “need” for “austerity” (spending cuts) in the UK; above all, the whole “holocaust” farrago, especially not but exclusively the “gas chambers” nonsense.
When I returned from Rhodesia in 1977, I took a number of easy-to-get (in those days) short-term jobs. One was hauling around sacks of mail at the Royal Mail sorting office at Redhill, Surrey. Another worker was an older fellow, doing a few months before Christmas, and who had spent his long naval career in submarines. We were talking one day, amid the sacks of mail, about Atlantis. He said that he was sure that there had never been Atlantis, or an Atlantean civilization, because he had spent months, indeed years, on submarines submerged in the Atlantic Ocean, and had never seen anything!
What could one say to such an unthinking person? Ask how many portholes his submarine had?! Make the point that any remains not destroyed by 10,000+ years of tides, currents, and the pressure of water etc, would probably not be detectable by such as sonar?
Pointless to argue with some people, because you are arguing with facts (using the intellect), whereas the “Natalies” of this world have an emotional response based purely on an embedded belief itself based on what others have sown in the uncritical field of their minds.
If two scribblers for the Irish Daily Mail (someone called Tom Doorley —apparently a restaurant critic— and one Phillips, a reporter or other “journalist”) yesterday reacted quite as unthinkingly in defence of “Bootstrap Cook”, then what can be expected of “Natalie”? In fact, said scribblers were far more rude, and no more intelligent, in their response to a tweeter tweeting about “Jack Monroe”, than “Natalie”.
I guess I’m not being investigated then? It seems I’ll get away with my dastardly crime of posting screenshots and saying ‘huh?’
I suppose that “Jack Monroe” will be fairly sanguine about the Twitter-storm around her behaviour. After all, so far 600+ people are still each shoving £3.50-£10 her way every single month, most of the public will be unaware of the questions raised about her, and the major msm outlets (Observer etc) are still puffing her entirely uncritically.
Late tweets seen
Also, it seems @bootstrapcook doesn't even have an official autism diagnosis. Not many autistic people constantly self promote on Twitter or accept any TV opportunity with ease. The woman's a full on fraud and I am so glad people are finally seeing the light. #karma
Things *are* happening through multiple channels, but it's also essential that people are warned so that Jack Monroe can't keep conning them out of money with her lies. "The only thing necessary for evil to triumph in the world is that good men do nothing"
Politicians are hell bent on turning the ~UK into the worlds fund whilst making UK taxpayers pay for it. Cop 27: Britain opens the door to climate change reparations for poorer nations https://t.co/k4ilAR0DBn
Well, let’s see…non-white UK Prime Minister arranges with other non-white “leaders” (globalist puppets) that the British people should pay for the corruption and incompetence of non-white “states”. What is wrong with that? Oh, no, wait…
Can we just nail this one. It is utterly insane – in the current economic and fiscal climate – to ask the British people to use money that could be spent on vital public services on "environmental reparations" for Mauritius and Pakistan.
It is not often that I agree with Dan Hodges, but strange times [etc]…
Which country would you settle in if you had to leave Britain? Canada 15% Australia 14% New Zealand 14% USA 7% South Africa 4% Others 9% Don’t know 37%
Interesting that most British people chose countries with a mainly British ethnic base; even the USA does have that to some extent, and of course a common language as well.
As for myself, it would depend, at least to a major extent, on the position I would be in. Emperor or slave? Poet or peasant? I would not want to live in an area without trees, either.
🚨🚨New Voting Intention🚨🚨 Labour lead is eighteen points in latest results from Deltapoll. Con 29% (+3) Lab 47% (-4) Lib Dem 9% (-) Other 16% (+1) Fieldwork: 4th – 7th November 2022 Sample: 1,049 GB adults (Changes from 28 – 31 October 2022) pic.twitter.com/ufnUn4YyMr
— Redfield & Wilton Strategies (@RedfieldWilton) November 7, 2022
Both opinion polls show a slight swing back to equilibrium after the recent polls showing Con below 20%. Still, 27% or 29% is still low, and there are said to be spending cuts, and restrictions on pay and benefits, to come, which must impact what little popularity the Con Party has. The continuing cross-Channel migration invasion as well.
According to Electoral Calculus, the present state of play might result in an overall Lab majority of about 154 seats: https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/userpoll.html; Con Party with about 150 seats, Lab around 400.
Goodness me! Can this be right? Cloth face masks are 'comfort blankets' that do little to curb Covid spread, Sage adviser warns https://t.co/7j16kpIGqP
This whole nonsense of over-reaction to the virus must be ended! People who are completely or effectively OK are now being told to isolate, not to go out, not to go to work. Important functions such as control rooms for power generation and transport are ceasing to operate, all because of this pathetic testing and tracing regime.
At some point, the country must wake up from this whole delusion.
“Well, I now have to praise the BBC’s Nick Robinson for saying this on the Today programme on Wednesday: ‘The evidence is that the masks that most of us wear, the one I have got here in my pocket, a sort of cotton mask that you either make yourself or that you buy, gives you no protection at all, absolutely none.’ After ages of assuming that loose cloth masks are effective, this must be the first time a major BBC presenter has stated the experimental truth. Yet nobody seems to have noticed.” [Peter Hitchens, in the Mail on Sunday].
“Ultra-feminists despised the decent, honourable tasks of motherhood, claiming that the only road to fulfilment lay in wage-slavery outside the home. Any fool could have told them that paid employment is not the road to freedom, but they did not want to hear this. And nobody has yet devised a way of getting men to embrace the tasks wage-slave women no longer have time to do. So they don’t get done.” [Peter Hitchens, Mail on Sunday].
“Lots of idiots still admire Cuba, believing the propaganda of its nasty, despotic junta. I think this is because so many of the former student revolutionaries of the 1960s imagine themselves in beards and fatigues riding at the head of a triumphant revolutionary parade into the fallen citadels of conservative, Christian civilisation.
The truth about Cuba – that it is a miserable, rationed secret-police state that even has first-class money for the elite and second-class money for its ordinary people – has always been unwelcome.
So has the fact that this potentially wealthy country is run by drearymiddle-aged bureaucrats, fearful of their subjects, with brains of solid Marxist concrete, about as rebellious and romantic as a public lavatory. Yet the youthful, barricade-storming image must still be maintained. Its official radio station, a conduit of weary, censored propaganda, is called Rebel Radio.
But now a real rebellion against these self-styled rebels has broken out on the streets of Havana. It looks to me like a proper uprising from below, not orchestrated by anybody.
And the admirers of Castro’s squalid state – who still litter the BBC, the universities, the schools, the media and the Civil Service – don’t know what to do or say. For they do not want to admit that, like the man they long admired, they have themselves become an intolerant, inflexible ruling class.“[Peter Hitchens, Mail on Sunday]
Very true. I have argued all my life against idiots who thought that Marxist-Leninist or derivative regimes in the Soviet Union, Cuba, North Vietnam, Nicaragua, and now Venezuela were decent and worth supporting.
As far as Cuba is concerned, the sort of people who even now support it are (generalizing wildly) like the NHS doctor whose cottage near Totnes I was once (2001) thinking of renting. She could not show me the place because, I was told, she is “cycling in Cuba”. Cuba is revered by some because it trains vast numbers of health professionals, who are then ordered to work in other countries so that Cuba can get foreign exchange, or barter goods.
As for the British and other mugs who supported the Cuban-inspired Sandinistas in the 1980s, they are still around, those that never woke up (to reality, not “wokeness”), and now support Venezuela, “Black Lives Matter” etc. Nicaragua itself is now suffering under the ex-Sandinista rebel, Ortega, and is a complete mess, but the “woke” idiots have other idols these days.
“Che” would not necessarily now be on their side, had he escaped being given a couple of rounds in the head in Bolivia over 50 years ago:
Socialism of the old type has frozen Cuba in time, to an extent that even the Soviet Union was not. Occasionally one sees TV people doing travel shows about Cuba. I think that Michael Portillo did one mainly about Cuba’s shambolic trains; Chris Tarrant certainly did.
Cuba’s trains are apparently kept going by all sorts of weird and wonderful methods, rather like those “iconic” 1950s American cars that ferry tourists around Havana.
Havana itself is falling to pieces. Occasionally, buildings just collapse after decades of little or no maintenance.
To some extent, I can see why some British, other European, American, people “support” Cuba: it has stood its ground against its superpower neighbour, it has its own identity etc. Other people have felt that way about other small and embattled states: Rhodesia, Israel, Taiwan, even North Korea. However, that is a sentimental attachment (if any) better indulged from a distance.
Cuba is basically a shambles. Admittedly, I myself have only seen it directly from the air (overflying from Tampa, Florida, to Grand Cayman), and from the sea (between Cuba and Jamaica).
My only contact with Cuban bureaucracy was when some British and expat Iranian scientists asked me to help find a sponsor for their biofuel project (I called it, to myself, “making gold out of straw”). A couple of countries were interested. This was in or about 1995.
The Ukrainian Ambassador in London even accompanied me (in his rather nice chauffeur-driven Lexus limousine) to Porton Down research centre (Wiltshire) one day, to meet with the team at their labs. That led to nothing, but at least the Ukrainians were interested. The Cuban Ambassador did not even reply to my letter! That despite the fact that Cuba would have been ideal— a country in need of fuel, with a huge quantity of otherwise unusable biomass (sugar cane detritus), and with a large cadre of scientifically-trained labour. Useless. Well, there it is…
UK PM Boris Johnson and Chancellor Rishi Sunak will now self-isolate after Health Secretary Sajid Javid tested positive for Covid, after criticism for joining pilot daily testing schemehttps://t.co/HqN323Lkc3
How many millions of humanoid rabbits will be pointlessly “self-isolating”, and to what extent need the country collapse, before enough people wake up to the fact that this whole thing is a nonsense? People are being played like balalaikas.
The streets of Paris, France are packed with people protesting the governments mandatory vaccine and vaccine passes.
The vaccine passes will restrict unvaccinated individual's access to restaurants, shopping malls, hospitals, trains, and planes. pic.twitter.com/1O28IVdzdG
President Macron announced that vaccine passes would be required to access theaters, restaurants, hospitals, to use trains & planes starting next month. Also the pass will be required to visit leisure and culture venues starting July 21.
evicted from West Jerusalem. Under Israeli law they have no equivalent right to evict those who now occupy their ancestral homes in West Jerusalem. The property rights are asymmetric. And here you can see the police compelling a Palestinian to bring down a Palestinian flag…
usually with professional qualifications. This is a picture of the house opposite the el-Kurds that is occupied by settlers and has become the symbol of a conflict that is both very local and represents a much bigger problem. By the way, as many of you… pic.twitter.com/yVNLY3pxE6
know, I am not anti Israel. Quite the oppose. But this is an injustice that would be important to highlight wherever it was. And here, in case you missed it, is @chedwardes moving interview in @thetimeshttps://t.co/SXf5ZHsL2C
Robert Peston is Jewish (or possibly part-Jewish…I am uncertain), but not particularly, if at all, sectarian. He was not brought up to be sectarian, I believe I read somewhere. That kind of distinction was recognized, up to a point, in National Socialist Germany, under the “Nuremberg Laws”, where those who were Mischlingen, or part-Jew, were treated in law differently depending on whether they adhered to Jewish religious communities etc, or not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Laws#Classifications_under_the_laws.
As can be seen in those tweets and reports, the Jews in Israel use “lawfare” (“legal” warfare) to get what they want. When that fails on its own, they use illegal methods, pressure, corruption, and ultimately violence. In the end, it is little different in the UK, France, and other places where Jews exist in large numbers.
Late tweets seen
But not the sinister and racist Labour Against Antisemitism whose members range from posting the most antisemitic filth, to being charged with affray and harassment https://t.co/FrFEwndUi7
If this was Muslims harassing Zionist Jews @BBCNews and the whole of MSM would be calling them terrorists and dog whistling Holocaust remembrance? https://t.co/PaQ5qi1fG2
Permanent capital is buying up entire neighborhoods expecting you to work harder and longer in the world they've made where you'll own nothing and be happy https://t.co/fpdV2nrko8
I am waiting to see what happens when facemask-wearing is no longer mandated by law in supermarkets etc (tomorrow). “Boris”-idiot has of course weaselled by saying ppl still “should” wear them! What a spineless bastard he is! He has all the leadership and prime ministerial qualities of a jellyfish.
I think @SirGrahamBrady has been a strong advocate for sanity & balancing risks, amidst great political pressure to conform to the lockdown/fear narrative. 👏
— Helena Morrissey DBE (@MorrisseyHelena) July 18, 2021
3) Peter Hitchens: Britain turns out to be the great nation of the gormless.
Thanks @darrenjsaudners, but you'll be lucky if you get free minds for all. Voluntary masking( and much of it *is* voluntary) is a gesture of submission to the allegedly benevolent loving state. https://t.co/7Ea4IDpnTT
Yes. Much of the scare regime of the past 19+ months has been superficially “voluntary” (the idiots wearing facemasks while cycling in the country etc). There was some Jew, a few years ago, who ran a thing at Downing Street called the “Nudge Unit”, trying to pressure the public to do this or that without using law. Is that unit still around in some form?
The massive 1995 Rhine floods appear to have been forgotten.
And don't build on flood plains.
— Laurence Lowne – Combyne Grp (@LaurenceCombyne) July 18, 2021
…and the usual idiots and Greta Nut supporters are already saying that Germany is flooded because of “climate change”, despite the fact that it has happened many many times before.
'Hannah Cloke, professor of hydrology at Reading University, said that a “monumental failure of the system” had led to one of postwar Germany’s deadliest natural disasters, which had by last night claimed at least 133 lives since Wednesday' https://t.co/KVEZrTR7jc
Actually, @golbadock_dan it is a freedom, not a right. But it is one of the very few actual powers the people possess. Imagine if they held an election, and nobody came. A close-to-zero vote would deprive the current political class of legitimacy, and force major reform. https://t.co/oyPsMrP61Q
Peter Hitchens is sadly deluded here, though perhaps if only a tiny handful were to vote, it might present a moral challenge. That never happens. Not in major elections. Voting is usually pointless; abstention is always pointless. Something else might get rid of the present nuisances, but I think that, in the present climate, I prefer not to suggest it…
“Boris”
Surely it cannot be denied that his presentation and manner are closer to those of Jew comics than of English statesmen?
Eton and Oxford may put a gloss on someone such as “Boris”, but that gloss is a very thin veneer.
Protest against the slave pass in Nicosia today. About 20,000 people turned up. 💕Families, young people, soldiers, priests and I saw quite a few pregnant women. The no vax = no grocery shopping has really woken people up. The common thread today ~ We are fighting demons. 🤍🙏🤍 pic.twitter.com/1juDYbXOGA
— The European Housewife ~ Supernova 888 (@housewife8888) July 18, 2021
The UK has recorded fewer Covid deaths in the past 40 days combined than just one day of cancer deaths. Just watch the masked continue to shuffle around in fear 🤦♂️
You can . I agree with you, and that is why I favour much greater restrictions on private car ownership, generous subsidies for trains and trams, and proper provisions to make walking and cycling easier. https://t.co/KSBJJ6GDwH
Peter Hitchens’ idea of transport, not very practical. So people wanting to travel across country with, perhaps, children, luggage, whatever, should have to struggle with buses and trains, like Soviet citizens of the 1970s or British citizens of the (?) 1940s? Much easier to load everything into a car.
It is true that there are far too many cars on the roads of the UK, but the answer is a smaller population.
1/2 @cliveshaw11. The government's strangulation policy has restricted freedom of movement, freedom of association, freedom of assembly, and the freedom to conduct private life. In my view it also threatens the freedoms of thought and speech. https://t.co/MLEXhOzP6y
You do have it right @johnhundeslit. I regard 'libertarianism' as an absurdity. Our liberties conflict and so cannot be exalted into a universal rule. Morals and the law have to referee among our competing freedoms. That requires limited government. https://t.co/ovnak8kOqV
That is true @alexberenson, but in the USSR everything was the Party and the State, whereas we are *supposed* to have a plural society and do not. Most of us did nit notice is decline in the last 30 years, or its death in the last 12 months. https://t.co/LxBE1d7By6
Exactly. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, heralding the end of old-style socialism across the world (yes, there are a few pathetic pockets such as Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela, all poverty-stricken and absurd), I was discussing the changes with acquaintances. I had just returned to the UK from my latest (and what turned out to be my last) trip to Poland.
The acquaintances just mentioned thought that the political revolution across “the satellites” meant “freedom”. While agreeing up to a point, my view was that the Central and Eastern European peoples involved were swapping one big dictator (socialist government and its ruling party in each country) for a multitude of small dictators (capitalist employers, mainly).
Now we see that both government and those non-governmental foci are oppressing the populations of Europe with a huge weight of, not only laws and taxes, but “rules”, “guidance”, politically-approved nonsense (never criticize Jewish behaviour, the behaviour of blacks or browns, never be “sexist” or “racist” —however defined—, never openly support white European race and culture etc).
The propaganda in favour of racemixing, for example, has become so blatant that even the sleepy public, even a few System MPs, have woken up to it. The white, often blonde, woman, the black “husband” figure, the mixed-race children. Every second or third ad on TV now.
This is the “Great Replacement”, the Coudenhove-Kalergi Plan, or to put it another way, “White Genocide”, and it is embedded in almost every TV ad, almost every TV drama, and so on. I wrote the following over two years ago: https://ianrobertmillard.org/2018/12/10/tv-ads-and-soaps-are-the-propaganda-preferred-by-the-system-in-the-uk/. Since then, the pace has intensified. Tweeting, blogging, vlogging, or writing letters of protest, will not stop it or those behind it.
Afternoon music
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An drug offender would have to do something extreme to get anywhere near 5 years . This woman must be laughing at the Law & her punishment .https://t.co/QMAYw8qM1v
In fact, these days in the UK, people who do “ordinary” crimes generally have to work quite hard to get a custodial sentence. Every day one sees, in the popular prints, defendants effectively let off despite having committed real and serious crimes. I saw two yesterday, just in passing.
One was a woman who had stolen £45,000 from a charity, in breach of trust. Not imprisoned because she had children, and only because she had children! The other was an abusive ex-boyfriend of a young woman, which woman was beaten by said “ex” with a baseball bat, after he had smashed his way into her home. Sentence? Non-custodial.
When it comes to what is (though the System will deny it) “political” crime, such as posting satirical songs about Jews and/or “holocaust” fakery (Alison Chabloz in 2018), putting up white nationalist stickers on lamp-posts (someone in Wales got two-and-a-half years for that a while ago!), making a speech in Whitehall saying that Jews should be expelled from England as they have been in the past (in 2018, Jez Turner of the London Forum got a one-year prison sentence for such a speech), it is a different matter, and the defendant will be lucky to escape custody.
1933
In the USA, almost literal worship of money:
Meanwhile, in the Reich:
For me, perhaps the most distinguishing feature of the German Reich, as compared to both finance-capitalism (the West) and Marxist-Leninist socialism (the East) was that, as soon as National Socialists attained to political power in 1933, the things which had been promised to the German people were delivered, or at least began to be delivered. National Socialism delivered.
Very true. It began decades ago in Hollywood. Films would almost always show the nuclear scientist, the brain surgeon, the head of the CIA etc as a black man (not woman, as yet). The fact that this did not reflect reality in 99.9% of cases was not relevant. As with the huge contemporary campaign, especially in the UK, to show almost every family in TV ads, soaps, dramas etc as mixed-race to some degree, the aim was in fact not to reflect reality, but to create a different reality. Social engineering.
If a monkey hoarded more bananas than it could eat, while most of the other monkeys starved, scientists would study that monkey to figure out what the heck was wrong with it. When humans do it, we put them on the cover of Forbes.
I recall seeing (have not seen it since) the Sunday Times Rich List about 20 years ago. The wealthiest person in the UK was some Ukrainian Jew “worth” several billions. Now, we see that, in the world as a whole, Jeff Bezos of Amazon has assets valued at some £150 billion or more (and that is after his ex-wife got about £50 billions in a divorce settlement).
It goes without saying that anyone with vision could do a great deal with such money. Rewild a huge area. Create cities. Create national parks in poor countries (eg in Africa or Latin America). Establish institutes of advanced learning. And so on. The key words, though, are “with vision“, vision beyond the mercantile. A few very wealthy people have such vision (the obvious historical example is Andrew Carnegie), but most do not.
The fury over a bloke with dodgy tattoos on a woodwork show on Sky History shows how ridiculous “anti-fascism” has become. These time-rich tweeters really think they are the heirs to the heroes of Cable Street. They need to grow up, says Brendan O’Neillhttps://t.co/ZPuAnXpWdE
I must have missed that particular storm in a Twitter teacup. Typical, though. The self-described “Left” (a term which, like “Right”, I never use), or (pseudo-) “socialist” element has nohing much to say.
In 1989, socialism died, all over the world. That was as true of British socialism or social democracy as it was of Soviet socialism (which just expired and evaporated within a couple of years, being replaced by “oligarchic” kleptocracy), and Chinese socialism (which kept the names and forms of socialism while transforming into complete cut-throat capitalism under overall State supervision).
In Britain, the Labour Party changed from a social-democratic party with socialist roots and pretensions into a basically finance-capitalist party with social-democratic pretensions. Clause 4 (nationalization) was ditched; within a few years it was uncontroversial for the half-Jew Mandelson, Tony Blair’s most important ally, to say that he was “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich“. Imagine Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson or, say, James Callaghan saying that (in public)!
As Labour became a non-socialist party in the 1990s, the more socialist-oriented element in it became infected more and more with the peripheral politics of identity.
As a frequent browser in Collet’s London Bookshop in Charing Cross Road in 1976 (aged 19), I saw that they had shelves devoted to books and magazines about “sexual politics” and the like, as well as what became known as “multiculturalism”. I was social-national even then, and thought that those areas were, even in the context of Marxist/post-Marxist ideology, sideshows at best. I was right then, but wrong down the line, because it was exactly that sort of stuff that eventually took over, not the Labour Party as such, but the more “socialist”-leaning element within it.
What are the concerns of those “socialists” on, say, Twitter? “Refugees” (most of whom are bogus anyway); “LGBT” etc; supporting all the “Covid-19” nonsense (facemasks, lockdowns etc); “black lives matter”. After all those, maybe poverty too, but the real old-style socialists focussed on relief of poverty as of prime importance, together with the whole socio-economic pattern of society. Also, those old-style activists had a idea of how to achieve their objectives. The post-Marxists have exchanged that for what amounts to a virtue-signalling whine.
The Twitterati who think themselves “socialist” (there are exceptions), especially the “antifa” element and the Jew-Zionists, find their greatest pleasure and victory when someone with whom they disagree (usually unthinkingly) is expelled from Twitter. Most interesting tweeters (like me, if I immodestly say so) are now gone from increasingly dull Twitter.
Also, the Twitterati are often found complacently reciting that xyz (like me) have rightly been expelled from Twitter because “Twitter, Facebook, YouTube etc are commercial companies and can expel or deny service to anyone”. Pretty pathetic. A surrender to the marketplace, and a quasi-monopolistic marketplace at that. No thought as to the rights of the citizen qua citizen (eg free speech rights) going beyond mere contractual rights.
One might add that Twitter is the main playground of such people. Not the real world where real events happen and where questions of politics, questions of importance, are decided.
Whining on Twitter (“slacktivism”) becomes the substitute for real political or social action.
You can see all of that in the Corbyn saga of recent years. Corbyn Labour was not without its virtues, though Corbyn was really a surviving example of an old-style socialist surrounded by those new-style pseudo-socialist virtue-signallers; political coelacanth [“Coelacanths were thought to have become extinct in the Late Cretaceous, around 66 million years ago, but were rediscovered in 1938…The coelacanth was long considered a “living fossil““— Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coelacanth].
The result of the obsession with peripheral matters (perhaps the most bizarre and off-piste is re. “transphobia”) has been that Labour itself (and the so-called “Left” in general) has become politically almost irrelevant, despite the Labour Party being the only major “opposition” to a Conservative Party government of surpassing incompetence.
Matters of wide public concern: mass immigration and migration-invasion; education; NHS services; a future for the young; security for the old; the environment; housing; pay and benefits.
There are really only two groups now vying for ideological supremacy under the superficial show of politics: the System of “ZOG”, “NWO” etc, and social nationalism. The so-called “Left”, though vocal, is an irrelevance on the wider stage.
The year 2022, 33 years on from the last “reset” of world politics in and after 1989, will be of prime importance. Large-scale change.
If I was reverting to referencing benefits in response to every question & concern about poverty, unemployment & hungry children, I'd make an effort to fix the travesty of Universal Credit which is knowingly & deliberately pushing the most vulnerable into poverty, @BorisJohnson.
Yes but during the holidays 100% of state schools are closed. And it is no secret that universal credit is not enough for a family to live on and not quick or easy to get on if you have recently lost your job. Children are going to go hungry. How can you justify that?
As you’re such an expert on “many benefits”, please tell us how much money parents will get from Universal Credit, after loosing their incomes due to covid??? And then tell us how you’d pay your bills and “budget” on that??? Tories and their supporters are horrible people.
NEW: "The threat of sanctions is causing huge anxiety for people claiming Universal Credit who are shielding".@SeemaMalhotra1 says the continued threat of benefit sanctions when the government has lost control of the virus is completely untenablehttps://t.co/GKvBMptCVi
Imagine being so blindly loyal to a failing bunch of incompetent liars that you would read a pre-prepared statement advocating against providing school meals for children.
Brendan Clarke-Smith is Tory Scum. A pathetic, spinless little worm. https://t.co/iTXZadu82i
I had not previously heard of this backwoods MP. Seems that he was a teacher, somewhere; where? Only a (brief?) stint as headmaster of an unspecified school in Romania is noted. I suspect that he is yet another chancer and freeloader in the Commons. A Romanian wife who is a doctor in Bassetlaw, wherever that is (actually, Nottinghamshire). A prime candidate for my “Deadhead MPs” series. Watch this space.
In Brendan ‘nationalising children’ Clarke-Smith, Bassetlaw seems to have managed to find an MP even worse than John Mann. Solidarity with all those in the constituency who did not vote for him. You deserve better. As do children.
Perhaps Clarke-Smith might think about how real pay and the real level of State benefits have declined over the years, placing many —even many who are in full-time work— in poverty. He himself has presumably been able to live off his wife’s earnings (at least to a large extent) for years.
Source: 'But Conservative MP for Bassetlaw MP Brendan Clarke-Smith – who says he was a recipient of free school meals when he was a child – opposed the motion.'https://t.co/vO4BVmjHmM
Has anyone yet identified this superb citizen of Barnsley, who in a few clear phrases speaks more sense than you could hear in a month from the chattering classes in Parliament or on the disgraceful BBC? https://t.co/gDEogTqrzV
to vote against feeding poor children during a pandemic where parents are being denied universal credit, made redundant, unable to find new jobs bc the state of the economy, increasing costs EVERYWHERE etc just wow. but a pay rise for mp’s is apparently a necessity..?
Look at this despicable+seriously overweight man, claiming that "so much has been done for Universal Credit etc" completely ignoring the fact that a) UC is an utter shambles and b) hungry children can NOT wait for the months-long struggles to get food into their tummies🤬 https://t.co/7DlNtlg1eU
— Shoshana 🐝3.5% ⚪️🔴⚪️ Let's get into #GoodTrouble (@shoshanade) October 22, 2020
Sack this furlough & Universal Credit Shite. We need a Universal Basic Income. Minimum £1000 per month. This would still be less than minimum wage,more than the state pension,but liveable. Whether this is per person or household is debatable. This is affordable. 🙏😷🏴🏴🏴👍
Tory MPs blaming parents for children going hungry should really take a look at themselves. 10years of austerity, cuts to the system as well punitive universal credit measures has not helped people. Child poverty and homelessness has rocketed on their watch!
The idea that evil hypocrites such as Dunce Duncan Smith, the jew “lord” Freud, Esther McVey and Therese Coffey want to “help” people is naive, to say the least.
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The archive of last night's episode of Patriotic Weekly Review with Kelamaty & No Chance can be found on BitChute – please support my work on that platform as it contains a full archive of all my previous videos:https://t.co/zTrvlEpsxhpic.twitter.com/xDWMbqAvcv
No such thing as cake, I found milk, sugar and eggs in the recipe. This cake purity is ridiculous.
— 🏴☄️ Akura_Elvas ☄️🏴 (@AkuraElvas) October 21, 2020
Britain was greatest when her people weren’t being brainwashed into thinking they didn’t exist.
Imagine thinking our right to self-determination as indigenous people should ever be up for discussion. It’s not about appealing to the UN. It’s about appealing to our own. https://t.co/oL2l165Tig
Why does @ChtyCommission allow Zionist groups to ‘police’ UK citizens using tactics synonymous with The Cheka police. How long before ‘volunteers’ claim leather coats on expenses? Make no mistake #Chekism is alive and well just watch Joe Glasman’s video. https://t.co/zZvuGe5HWg
I would recommend that you inject some realism into your life. And what risks are you actually referring to? The selfish ones are those that are not bothering to look into what is really happening and are just lazily watching the TV and repeating what the 'paid for' puppets say pic.twitter.com/NM108ukNP3
1/2 Yes, but Professor Gupta is *also* more qualified than her (or you) to judge (and more qualified than Johnson, come to that) and *she* disagrees with Whitty. Experts aren't an excuse for ceasing to think . Intelligent people grasp that @jtwentyman. https://t.co/Wi53DEKAFi
2/2 @jtwentyman. But the BBC can be proud of you. Amazingly, you have managed to get through the past six months *wholly* unaware of the existence of scientific controversy (among experts!) about the wisdom of shutdown policies. Gosh. https://t.co/Wi53DEKAFi
The facemask zealots all pretend to be following The Science, but in reality their zealotry goes far deeper and has nothing to do with science, and everything to do with some strange wish to conform.
@DFlatwhite. You miss the point. Whatever people say in exalted moments, they support the NHS (and boy, do they, through heavy taxation) because they expect it to be there for them and their families when they need it. https://t.co/2MdBl9QlUO
I watched a BBC2 TV documentary about Venezuela. Something like Venezuela: Revolution in Ruins. I was of course au fait with the way in which other revolutions in history developed and, in many cases, degenerated: Russia/Soviet Union, China, Cambodia/Kampuchea, Ethiopia, Cuba etc, even France (from 1789). However, I especially wanted to understand better why this country, Venezuela, rich in oil, huge in area, fertile, with a coastline on the Caribbean, a number of scenic islands and also a huge exclusive economic zone (EEZ) under the Law of the Sea, should be in such a condition that 3 million or more, 10% of its population, have now fled, that large numbers of its inhabitants are starving, or rummaging for food in trash cans or dumps, or are foraging wherever they can.
Why are basic items such as loo roll, bread, milk, even fruit (in a tropical country where many fruits grow wild) effectively unavailable? Why are basic medicines not available? Why is oil being imported when Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world, exceeding even those of Saudi Arabia?
There is a natural human desire to make excuses for states espousing the overall values (superficially) espoused by the judging person. Thus we see pro-“socialist” people defending the Soviet record on human rights, living standards or generally, despite the early [Russian Civil] War Communism (under which strikers and others were shot, and anyone late for work could be imprisoned or sent to a labour camp), despite the Leninist and Stalinist repressions, the “GULAG Archipelago”, the Cheka/OGPU/GPU/NKVD/KGB etc. Thus we see people (British, other Europeans, North Americans, others) today defending Castro’s dictatorship in Cuba, despite the large number of persons shot, imprisoned or driven out under socialist rule.
The usual excuses for the failure of an old-style Marxist-Leninist socialist state are that:
foreign intervention ruined the economy and/or made the new regime more severely repressive than it otherwise would have been;
one or more individuals usurped or misused the power which properly belonged to “the people” and/or the “true” socialists;
existing private enterprises or wealthy persons either left the country (with their wealth) or stayed in the country and profiteered; in both cases, these parasitic classes of people sabotaged the socialist economy.
We can look at a few well-known examples to illustrate the syndrome.
Russia
Here is a typical example of a self-deluding socialist, one “Liz from Leeds”, heard via telephone on some daytime TV show (the black woman shown is the presenter):
Aaron Bastani and Ash Sarkar are supporters of Corbyn-Labour and part of a collective called Novara Media. I wrote about them —and others— in this article:
In that clip, hereinabove, “Liz from Leeds” asserts that Soviet socialism failed because
“14 foreign armies smashed it” and then
“Stalin took over and imposed a state-capitalistic totalitarian state”.
(and, by the way, “revolutionary” talking-head Ash Sarkar, on the show as a guest, and who teaches Global Politics at a former polytechnic —!—, can be seen nodding in apparent agreement at this ahistorical nonsense!).
“Liz from Leeds” obviously has little or no real knowledge of what seems to be her main interest, because:
the Intervention by “Western” powers in Russia only started to occur in July 1918, about 8 months after the start of the Russian Civil War. By that date, the various factions in the Civil War had already been fighting for months;
the largest and most powerful foreign contingent, the Czechoslovak Legion, eventually had 40,000 soldiers (93% Czech, 7% Slovak) in Russia, but this was not a foreign army in the sense of a state-controlled force. Czechoslovakia only declared independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire in December 1918. The Czechs etc were in Russia because they had been fighting with the Russian Empire against the Central Powers (including Austria-Hungary) in the First World War.
all this in a country of vast extent (over 90x the size of the UK), encompassing 11 time zones, in which the Bolshevik forces numbered some 5.5 million (and the White or anti-Bolshevik forces about 2.4 million).
in other words, the Intervention was fundamentally a side-show in the Russian Civil War. The war started in late 1917, eight months before Intervention, and continued until late 1922, two years after almost all Allied forces had left in 1920 (though Japanese forces occupied small parts of the later-termed “Soviet Far East” until 1922, and part of Sakhalin Island until 1925); in fact, the larger contingents, such as the 23,000 Greek troops in and around Odessa (to protect Black Sea Greeks), were only there for three months;
while Intervention affected the development of the Soviet Union (established late 1922), it did so mainly in the psychological sense. In fact, there were still outbreaks of anti-Soviet fighting as late as 1934 (in Central Asia), but there was no foreign backing for that. It was purely local and regional.
As to personality-cult etc, Stalin expanded the slave-state aspects of the Soviet Union, but that already existed: Lenin and his fellow-Communists (Jews and part-Jews, mostly, such as Dzerzhinsky) set up that system as soon as they seized power (in one fairly small corner of the Empire, i.e. Petrograd and Moscow, initially): executions on a vast scale, prison camps, prisons, labour camps, secret police and so on;
the Soviet Union was “State Capitalism”, but that was not the creation of Stalin. It was there from the very start of Lenin’s rule;
even the system of “nomenklatura”, with its gradations of special rations (the best being the Kremlin Ration [Kremlyovsky Payok], which developed under Stalin into a whole sector of special-privilege shops, apartments, health services etc), started during the Civil War: http://www.polithistory.ru/en/visit_us/view.php?id=1735
As to sabotage by parasitic classes, the Bolsheviks first destroyed (killed, exiled, imprisoned) the Imperial Family, then the aristocracy and the wealthy merchant class, but then moved on to those peasant families who were more affluent than average (the “kulaks“), then later to the peasantry as a whole (via Collectivization). Eventually new targets had to be found: a myriad of Diversionists, Deviationists, Trotskyists etc. “Enemies of the people”. By that time, most of the “former people” of pre-1918 had been exiled overseas, killed, imprisoned, or reduced to complete poverty in internal exile. Few existed in Soviet territory, outside camps and prisons, after the 1930s.
[Addendum: re-reading this in 2021, I realize that some people may object that Dzerzhinsky was not Jewish. Wikipedia describes his parents as “ethnically Polish”. Sadly, Wikipedia is not infallible. Though Dzerzhinky’s parents were technically second-generation “noble” under the Tsarist meritocratic honour system (Lenin’s father was “ennobled” for service as a schools inspector), and mainly of Polish origin, Dzerzhinsky’s father was part-Jew (as was Lenin’s mother)].
The “Liz from Leeds” school of cod-history is based on small nuggets of truth as well as large measures of wishful thinking. The Tsarist system was in need of reform; there were huge inequities; there was a foreign Intervention, though very limited, composed arguably of 12 mostly small forces rather than “14 armies” (and never intended to actually overthrow Bolshevism); there was the cult of personality (though it predated Stalin’s supremacy and was the child of Lenin, Trotsky/Bronstein and others in the early 1920s); there were wealthy or not-poor classes who could to some extent be described as parasitic (especially the absentee and rentier nobles). It is worth remembering that, pre-1914, the Russian economy was booming, and looked like overtaking Europe and North America before long.
However, the Soviet Union was badly flawed from its inception, and its evil seed was Marxism-Leninism. The idea that the political sphere (the State) should rule over both the economic sphere and the sphere of spirit, culture, education, medicine, was wrong in conception and was bound to lead to a greater or lesser disaster. The same mistaken conception brought low other lands (eg Cuba) and, our present interest, Venezuela.
In fact, the syndrome, in less savage or severe forms, also applies to the social-democratic regimes in Europe, such as the post-1945 British governments. Harold Wilson of the Labour Party blamed “speculators” and “the Gnomes of Zurich” (Swiss bankers) for the UK’s economic problems of the 1960s and mid-1970s, rather than nationalized industries and subsidies paid to industry and agriculture.
Below, a cartoon for “Liz from Leeds” and her colleagues in (?) the local social workers’ union or comprehensive school staff-room:
Cuba
The same applies to Cuba: socio-economic inequities, leading to revolution. That revolution elevating personalities (Fidel, Che etc). State takeover of the economy, including all major industry and agriculture. Eventually, shortages, corruption (you don’t think that Castro lived like the poor mulatto saps he ruled, do you?), repression. Cuba even had ineffective foreign (US) interventions: the Bay of Pigs botched “invasion” by proxy, the sanctions regime imposed by the USA (termed “Blockade” by Castro); attempts to assassinate Castro in various absurd ways (eg poisoned ice-cream). As for scapegoating, the Cuban regime has blamed American policy, counter-revolutionary Cubans based in Miami, but also Cubans in Cuba and who wanted to leave in the 1960s and 1970s, which people were called gusanos (“worms”).
The Cuban economy was kept afloat by Soviet subsidy (direct subsidy and also via preferential pricing of Cuban agricultural exports to the Soviet Union) until the early 1990s. Cuba then had to introduce a free-market element to the economy, in order to prevent complete collapse.
Venezuela
So we return to Venezuela. Again, socio-economic inequities led to demands for reform. Eventually, a revolution by election happened, in 1998, in this case led by an Army general, Hugo Chavez. I have no idea what Chavez was like as a general (though judging by his botched first coup d’etat, in 1992, not very effective), but as a political leader I regard him as having been a blundering clown, sometimes well-meaning, genial, friendly, sometimes sinister and frightening. In fact, with his televized clowning, inability to master facts, and populist emoting, he was reminiscent of a certain British politician, one who is superficially on another ideological page— Boris Johnson.
As the TV documentary I saw noted, Venezuela’s oil wealth bankrolled the social programmes which improved the lot of many of the poorer Venezuelans. Chavez was voted into power by 56% of the population, mostly the poor and some of the “disenchanted middle class”.
No attempt was made to diversify the economy. When oil prices fell, Venezuela went into a spiral. The tensions within the country worsened, many left (the wealthy by air to the USA and other countries, the middleclass nouveaux pauvres and the real/always-been poor by car or on foot to neighbouring countries).
The US sanctions on Venezuela have enabled the Venezuelan government, now under Maduro, to claim, however implausibly, that those sanctions largely caused the economic collapse.
Chavez expropriated and redistributed land, again with “good intentions”, but the net result has been both a falling-off in food production and a great fall in dollar-exports, which in turn restricted the supply of foreign imports of food (and other goods).
Chavez blamed “speculators and hoarders” for the problems, imposed price controls, replaced private supermarkets by a chain of 16,000 State shops and supermarkets, which however now have almost bare shelves. Chavez also nationalized large food producers. The result has been a breakdown in food supply. Children are starving, adults and children alike scavenge in the trash for anything to eat. The Roman Catholic Church has asked those who discard any food waste to label it so that people can rummage in the rubbish dumps and trash cans for it. Meanwhile, the government set up 6,000 soup kitchens.
Thoughts
I have never been to Venezuela (nor any part of Latin America south of Panama), and I have only known one person who has visited the country (a girlfriend who attended a week-long international conference in Caracas in the 1980s). My views are therefore taken from what I have read and what I have watched on TV.
It is clear to me that Venezuela’s problems are, at root, political. There was always poverty there, but the cure has been worse than the illness. Chavez was a political clown, who had no idea how to run a government, let alone an economy, but who decided, amid clowning and behaving like a public entertainer, to take the reins of the economy firmly in his own hands. He took over the oil industry, agriculture, food production and distribution, imports and exports generally, even banking. He tried to run industries himself or via equally-inept cronies.
The result has been disastrous. Thousands and quite possibly millions may have died from lack of food and medicine, as well as via militarized repression (the troops always look fit and well-fed…). To my mind, those responsible for this politico-economic disaster could not complain were they to be taken out and shot. Chavez himself died a few years ago; his daughter is apparently one of the wealthiest women in the world. Before people start praising Chavez, they might start to ask where those hundreds of millions of dollars came from.
What Chavez should have done would have been to
regulate, tax, but not operate businesses;
by all means nationalize oil production, as a national strategic asset, but employ only experts experienced in upstream and downstream oil to operate it;
work with landowners (existing landowners and new entrants) to maximize and diversify domestic food production; set a cap on acreage held by any one family;
revalue the currency;
create social programmes from taxes raised, not directly from oil revenues.
All the same, there are those in British political life who praised Chavez: Diane Abbott and Jeremy Corbyn, to name the two most prominent. They have been quiet about Venezuela for a while now, as that country slides into chaos, but some of their colleagues still beat the drum. Here is Chris Williamson MP (whom I am loath to impliedly criticize, because he is pro-animal welfare, and used to retweet me on Twitter occasionally; and because the Jew-Zionists hate him, but truth conquers all):
(in fact, the Venezuelan government has only hit 24% of its housing target, though the programme itself may be OK in principle).
It seems to me that the only thing to do in Venezuela is to rip up the Chavez-Maduro system and begin ad novum. That means a different government, an all-out war on crime, corruption and disorder, a private-enterprise economy (except for oil production), a clear and effective tax system, an appeal for all Venezuelans now overseas to return and to help rebuild. Also, the government has lost control of the borders of the State and has lost control of the streets. Gangs are rampant. Firing squads may be necessary. An effective border force must be set up. Above all, consumer goods and/or including food must be prioritized, urgently. In this case, butter before guns, up to a point at least.
Racial Aspects
Racial aspects are important. Cuba was ruled by Spanish-descended Europeans and to some extent also mestizos, until Castro drove most of them to the USA or elsewhere. Now Cuba has a far higher percentage of blacks than it had in 1959. Venezuela is about 54% mestizo, only 43% white (and that figure is out of date; there must be far fewer white people now).
Could It Happen Elsewhere?
Never say never. Russia was booming only four or five years before it fell into civil war and despair under Lenin. Cuba, though corrupt and unequal, was in a far better state in the 1940s and 1950s (even though plagued by the Jewish gangster Meyer Lansky etc) than it is now. From what I have seen on TV, much of Havana seems to be just falling apart, literally. As to Europe, who knows? Reasonably-civilized Yugoslavia fell into civil war and bloody chaos only 25 years ago.
Now that Europe has been invaded by untermenschen, who are breeding, who knows what lies ahead? Britain is increasingly non-white, while the real British (white) population is, in my view at least, less and less cultured. You only have to look at those who are now MPs. Many MPs, and not only Labour Party ones, would not have been seen in the Palace of Westminster before the 1990s, unless working as cleaners or office staff.
As to economy, we have seen that Corbyn-Labour (yes, well-meaning, as were many radicals and revolutionaries prior to taking power) has praised Castro, Chavez, even Lenin and Trotsky! British Labour Party policy may not go as far as that which Labour leaders have praised in other lands, but never say never…
Listening again to painfully naive “Liz from Leeds”, it occurs to me that her definition of “Communism” could apply to almost any self-describing political movement, as well as to, say, Christianity. In fact, Valentin Tomberg [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valentin_Tomberg], whose mother and pet dog were both killed (tied to a tree and shot) by those lovely kind Communists after the Bolshevik Revolution, made the point in one of his works that it was the small “Christian” element in Communism that made people willing to support it and struggle for it.
“Communism” as defined by “Liz from Leeds” is the sort of platitudinous wishful thought that might be heard on Radio 4’s Thought For The Day. Stalin once cut short a discussion (which must have been unwittingly hilarious) among his mostly useless Politburo members, as to what “Socialism” (the earlier stage, in Marxist theory) was, by saying “I’ll define Socialism for you— it’s where the Red Army halts its trucks!”
21 January 2019: a few more thoughts
Some reading the above article may imagine that my being opposed to fossilized 20thC socialism must mean that I am a free-market anti-communist and nothing more. Not so. My views favour policies which are social, rather than socialist. For me, economic enterprises must be regulated and taxed (and that is the business of government), but not directly run by the State. By the same token, the world of business must not interfere with the organs of the State, must not buy or own politicians or civil servants.
29 January 2019
It occurs to me that Che Guevara was at least to some extent in the real world, unlike most of those who admire him…
Andrew Neil on BBC2 This Week nails Ken Livingstone to the mast…
"If all that's true, it would be appalling, but I have watched America impose sanctions… an appalling impact on their country" @ken4london on how Alan Johnson & Esther McVey reacted to his #bbctw film
Below, an interview with Venezuelan quasi-dictator Maduro. While he is probably right to say that the USA would like to have a firmer superpower grip on Venezuela, Maduro cannot explain Venezuela’s fall into chaotic poverty by reference to that American wish or strategy. He’s an idiot…
President Maduro tries to make a BBC journalist understand the political war that the US extreme right is waging against Venezuela. pic.twitter.com/fNQZplj1W1
Venezuela's health crisis is so bad that patients who go the hospital need to bring their own food and medical supplies, like syringes and scalpels, as well as their own soap and water, says a new report. https://t.co/dFRcpuS4X5
"While migrants and cocaine leave Venezuelan shores in growing quantities, food and medicines travel the other way, for purchase by those in Venezuela who still have access to hard currency," writes @JerryMcdermott:https://t.co/InI2XAYPi3
The coup isn't organic, nor is the destabilisation that has been steady levelling Venezuela for some time now. It's just the flavour of the year 'guy that needs to go and make sure the media tells everyone why'. I assume Guaido is being paid well by someone. pic.twitter.com/ti2J0XRCYw
Well, the Venezuelan rebellion has failed, mainly because the Army would not back it. Also it seems that the leader of the uprising, who now hides out in the Spanish Embassy in Caracas, is a silly ineffective fellow. We saw something similar in Zimbabwe, when the opposition to Mugabe years ago was led by a silly and thick African (supposed) “liberal” (later killed in the USA, in a plane crash). The lesson is that a dictator may be opposed by less wicked people but those possibly better people may simply be ineffective.
Meanwhile, for the Venezuelan poor (i.e. almost all inhabitants), the agony (caused mainly by simplistic socialism) continues:
Venezuela’s fall is the single largest economic collapse outside of war in at least 45 years, economists say https://t.co/EP1bJWFTJV
Here is another little twit of the same or similar tribe, one “Chris#WeBackCorbyn/@Socialist_Chris”:
Criminals, thieves and worse. I wouldn't even allow them to stand.
I don't agree with fascist parties being allowed to take part in democratic elections, considering they stand for dismantling democracy in the first place.https://t.co/p7BY8nQeUy
— Chris #WeBackCorbyn (@Socialist_Chris) July 16, 2019
To understand the fullness of this idiot’s repressive ideological fanaticism, you have to read the whole thread. He thinks that parties or people which are “fascist” (as decided by him? as decided by a troika of secret police officers? as decided by a Stalinist-style fixed meeting of “activists”?) should be barred from elections or other political activity.
“Socialist Chris” seems very limited in his mentality. His derivative and flawed narrative about being intolerant of intolerance is not only hackneyed in the extreme, but is dependent on him or people like him deciding what is “fascist” (and so unacceprable…to him). He says that “you cannot compare fascism and socialism”. In a sense, true. Many 20thC types of “socialism” were far worse (more repressive, more evil, less effective in any field but repression) than Fascism (eg Mussolini, Franco) or even (different from “Fascism”), National Socialism.
Those books, and thousands of others, show that when relatively undiluted “socialism” takes power (whether by force or election), political freedom vanishes. That has been true in every instance of importance, from the Soviet Union and China to Cuba and Venezuela.
I suppose that “Socialist Chris” would make the usual excuses (see above) re. all that. He cannot see that “socialism” in the 20th (and now 21st Century, as far as “socialism” has even existed since 1989) is and has been far more repressive than either “fascism” or National Socialism, and that both Fascism and National Socialism achieved far more for the people than Marxist (etc) “socialism”, and in far less time.
An idiot, and yet looking at his tweets, I see that he makes much of having written a “dissertation” (on post-1945 “fascism”). No university mentioned. Maybe Oxford, maybe Cambridge, maybe the God-Knows-Where University of Travel and Tourism, who knows? No mention of a specific profession or occupation, just that he works up to 13 hours a day (which seems doubtful, but maybe that’s life in a call centre…I wouldn’t know).
Here’s another idiot, supporting “Socialist Chris”:
No, that isn't what he is suggesting. But they aren't legitimate political ideology, unless you want to consider the nazis a legitimate entity rather than a genocidal regime. Nazis shouldn't be allowed to get into power. Nazis aren't democratic.
What happens if they stand, win and then remove the vote? You know, without telling you before they won that election that they would seek to do so?
Ahh sure don't worry about it, it'll never happen again, we've all learned so much. 🙄 https://t.co/QmxlVKHLdV
— Chris #WeBackCorbyn (@Socialist_Chris) July 16, 2019
Marxist “socialists” wouldn’t do that, would they? Remove the vote from people? Never! Ha ha! No, they would more likely seize power forcibly in the first place, then label all opposition “fascist” (and so barred from existing at all), then hold meaningless “votes” in elections containing only approved non-“fascists”…
It is worrying that someone such as “Socialist Chris” can undergo primary, secondary and tertiary education, including as it seems a valueless “Master’s degree” and even perhaps a pointless “doctorate”, yet still be unable to reason. But that is where we are…
Update, 25 August 2013
Here’s another idiot, one @eshaLegal. A lawyer? If so, remarkably ill-informed about modern history, especially that of the Soviet Union, Stalin etc. Seems to be an Indian or Pakistani living in the USA. Read the thread to see others put her right (more or less right), anyway.
Victims of Stalinism? You mean Nazi war criminals? You want us to remember Nazi war criminals along with Nazi victims?
I am moved to write this by a couple of stimuli. First of all by a UK Labour Party National Executive Committee delegate (I think on the NEC as “youth” representative) to some recent conference in Cuba, and who said something like how wonderful it was to be in a country which showed how real socialism worked.
The second impetus came from an interview I heard on BBC World Service radio: an interview with an “artist” of whom I had never heard, called Tania Bruguera. Apparently, her father had been a Cuban diplomat and politician, and had actually handed her over aged 7 (or maybe I misheard and it was 17) to the security police with the statement that she had said anti-“Fidel” things and that the security police should do with her what they liked. She now says that that was a result of the Cuban system of selfish save-your-own-neck denunciation (rather than her own father being a complete shit, which is what she probably really thinks).
I looked up her “art” (“installations”, “performance art” etc). Unimpressed. To me, it looks like talentless rubbish. Having said that, she has the right to do it, which right is not accepted in Cuba. She is allowed to travel fairly freely. These days, she gets hassled and threatened, at times arrested, though not simply shot or chucked into a concentration camp or prison, which is what might have happened in the 1960s or 1970s.
There is the nagging feeling that Corbyn and many around him actually view states such as Cuba, 1980s Nicaragua, or even the Venezuela of recent years as success stories. I have previously blogged about Corbyn’s almost fossilized politics and policies, as well as his friendly or supportive attitude towards Cuba:
As regular readers of this blog will know, I am not totally hostile to Corbyn and at least some of his supporters (vis a vis the misnamed “Conservatives”), inasmuch as the Corbynists want to create a more equitable society in the UK, want to control or remove the Jewish-Zionist influence which has been so pervasive since about 1989, want people to have decent health, housing, social security etc. The devil, however, is in the detail.
The intellectual inconsistency of many of the Corbynists is shown by the fact that while they oppose Jewish exploitation of and behaviour toward the Palestinian Arabs, they ignore the same pattern when Jews exploit British, German or French (or Russian!) people; they also often still unthinkingly parrot “holocaust” propaganda. Corbyn and John McDonnell are themselves prime examples.
Another example: Most people accept that, in any market economy, more labour available means lower unit labour cost. Many of the Corbyn-Labour people disagree. They say that mass immigration makes no real difference to pay, even at the lower levels. Employers are to blame for exploiting employees and government is to blame for not simply setting a high minimum pay level. Faced with that kind of economic illiteracy, one tends to shake head and refuse to argue. Those people, though, genuinely think that all that has to be done for paradise to descend is for the State to lay down and enforce pay levels and, indeed, price levels.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman said, many years ago, that one can have a welfare state, and one can have open borders (and consequent mass immigration), but one cannot have both. When will Labour MPs and members wake up to this?
While there is room for relatively minor tinkering with pay and prices (minimum pay, enforced cheap prices in targeted areas such as public transport etc, even Basic Income —which I favour—), for the State to overwhelm the economic sphere is to invite the economic paralysis that caused even Cuba (and, famously, 1980s China) to introduce quasi-free market reforms, as indeed did Lenin himself in the Soviet Union, via his New Economic Policy of the 1920s. Complete State control of the economy leads to shortages or even economic collapse, as we see in Venezuela. I do not see much understanding of these truths in Corbyn or McDonnell.
It is in relation to mass immigration that we see the madness most obviously. In a sense, this is unsurprising. Polls have shown for some years that Labour is mainly voted for by the “blacks and browns”, in the sense that the one demographic which is very pro-Labour is that of the ethnic minorities (except the Jews, who hate Corbyn’s anti-Zionist tendencies).
I should not let anyone reading this go away under the misapprehension that I “prefer” the Conservatives to Labour. I oppose both main System parties, and Labour is at least (in parts, in some senses) anti-Zionist now. I also despise what the Conservatives have done since 2010 to trash society. However, anyone who thinks that Labour is a real alternative need only look at the total deadheads around Corbyn. Look at Diane Abbott, Dawn Butler (both of whom might well be Cabinet ministers under a Corbyn prime ministership!), or the recently disgraced MPs Kate Osamor and Fiona Onasanya (the latter will almost certainly be in prison soon). Not only blacks, by the way: Angela Rayner, for example, would probably be a Cabinet minister under a Corbyn government. Words start to fail…
I favour Labour over Conservative not because I imagine that Labour’s idiots are actually able to operate a government, but because
Corbyn and many of his supporters are now fighting directly against Zionism here in the UK, not merely in the Middle East; and
a weak government under Corbyn can lay the ground for social nationalism.
Notes
The title of this blog post of course refers back to the 1920 Leninist pamphlet usually referred to as Left-Wing Communism, An Infantile Disorder [Детская болезнь “левизны” в коммунизме], perhaps more accurately translated as The Children’s Illness, “Leftism”, in Communism. However, in using the words “infantile” and “disordered” to refer to some aspects of “Corbynism”, or some people in Corbyn-Labour, I do so advisedly…
I thought to include a few examples. Here’s one. Stupid enough to state on UK TV that she is “literally a Communist”! Hardy ha ha…but note that her absurd statement did not make her a pariah, despite the hugely bloodstained history of Communism/Socialism. Now what if she had said that she was “literally a National Socialist”? Hm…Ash Sarkar’s statement did not prevent her from continuing to write for major newspapers occasionally, and also to appear on TV from time to time. The Jewish influence over the mass media is right in front of us, and in the case of TV, “literally”!
Senior Editor @novaramedia. Literature bore. Anarcho-fabulous. Muslim. THFC. Walks like a supermodel. Fucks like a champion. Luxury communism now!“
Here is her Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ash_Sarkar which, unbelievably, states that she “lectures in global politics at Anglia Ruskin University” [former Anglia Polytechnic].
Wikipedia adds that “Sarkar’s great-great-aunt, Pritilata Waddedar, was a Bengali nationalist and an active participant in armed struggle against the British Empire in 1930s Bengal. Her grandmother is a hospital carer…Her mother is a social worker who was an anti-racist and trade union activist in the 1970s and 1980s. Sarkar’s mother helped “organise marches…“
“The Times has described her as “Britain’s loudest Corbynista“…and Dazed magazine said she is one of “the voices resetting the political agenda in the UK”.” [Wikipedia]
Basically, an enemy of the British people.
and take a look, or rather listen, to one “Liz from Leeds”, whose incredibly naive and just plain wrong (inaccurate, ahistorical) idea of, inter alia, “why Soviet socialism failed” is actually unintentionally funny. “Novara Media” (the collective of Corbyn supporters Ash Sarkar, Aaron Bastani etc) tweeting that “Liz from Leeds” was correct! [the black woman shown is the TV show presenter]
I don't get Ash Sarkar, the one annoying mouthpiece Corbyn's Labour. Also her media org sounds like…a virus? Also can you really be an academic without a phd? if you're teaching in universities, aren't you supposed to be somewhat neutral? also her politics is..shit and racist?
None of it is activism. Laurie Penny bobbing about as well like a bad namesake. They’re narcissistic exhibitionists getting paid and academically endowed for striking poses. Ash Sarkar is cut from similar cloth. Why the fuck does anyone take them seriously?
and here is another idiot, Hevreziya-Something, attempting to sound like a real “Communist” (who thinks that he –sounds more like she, but apparently not– can be “Anarchist” and –a male–“Feminist”, and a “Populist” etc all at the same time!…oh, and an economist…once he has finished school, that is, though he claims to have been commenting for years; age does not preclude political infantilism, I suppose)
This is why punching Nazis is crucial, as Ash Sarkar has said
— Hevrêziya Maherîzmê (Hood/Road Economist) (@HRZ_MRZ) January 3, 2019
he offers political advice in the tweet below, which made me laugh out loud (the bit about a General Strike in UK and USA, but the first tweet is also amusingly naive):
There needs to be a general strike – for all industries. We need to shut them down before they shut us down. ‘(Labour leader) Jeremy Corbyn should be firm and make his stance clear. ‘Labour should kick out the Blairites.’
— Hevrêziya Maherîzmê (Hood/Road Economist) (@HRZ_MRZ) January 2, 2019
More?
I'm not one to gossip, but I feel sorry for Liam Hemsworth, Miley Cyrus has a lot of past, and God knows she will cheat on him, all of us know this, but only a few will say it
— Hevrêziya Maherîzmê (Hood/Road Economist) (@HRZ_MRZ) December 27, 2018
Well, I think that I shall draw a veil over that particular “Communist/Anarchist/Populist” now! He/she probably has to go and wash its hair or something…
The trouble is that there are literally thousands of people, maybe hundreds of thousands, quite as stupid. Most support Labour. Many, such as Ash Sarkar and the Hevreziya-someone tweeter, above, are of non-European origin, but there are many others, such as the Englishwoman tweeting below, calling herself “Countess Helen Nonny Nay” [since this blog post was written, altered to Cringing Peasant Helen NonnyNay], who thinks that white British families who want a better life should just “fuck off” as the UK welcomes the dregs of Africa and Asia to our shores…
I don't care if a whinging family decide to move to Australia or not. Go on, fuck off! Or stay here – it makes no difference to me.
Caught out by background TV while doing my dusting. 💃
Actually, the sad thing is that some of these people have their hearts sort-of in the right place in some respects— animal welfare, a better society, anti-Jew-Zionism (though most are still brainwashed by the “holocaust” scam/myth). The white Northern European ones would support social-nationalism were they not so indoctrinated and silly.
Update, 6 January 2019
Another idiot, Laurie Penny, who was at one time on TV occasionally (like Owen Jones), until even msm people realized that (like Owen Jones) she is pretty much a one-trick pony…
Do these people, the Owen Jones’s, the Laurie Penny’s etc, realize that their intolerance (yes, their intolerance) might one day not only bring society (the Social Contract) crashing down, but bring down the skies on their own little worlds? I doubt it.
but then, the resistance…
Marxism-Leninism as a political force was destroyed or ebbed away to nothing by 1989 and a host of (other) devils have rushed in to fill the vacuum…
In the end, a complete cleansing of UK (and world) society will have to take place.
Further Update, 6 January 2019
I happened to see the photo below, a kind of “family portrait”: Ash Sarkar and Aaron Bastani in what is perhaps a room designed with reference to either “luxury Communism” or tasteless tat. You decide…
Below, Andrew Neil nails Ken Livingstone on Venezuela…
"If all that's true, it would be appalling, but I have watched America impose sanctions… an appalling impact on their country" @ken4london on how Alan Johnson & Esther McVey reacted to his #bbctw film
Not that everything said by Ash Sarkar (or Aaron Bastani) is wrong. This, below, is right (because grounded in reality, not incorrect theory):
It just really brought home to me that so many people in this country are in similar positions: trapped in low-paid and precarious work, up to their eyeballs in debt, with children and families to care for, but no avenue into quality employment.
What Ash Sarkar and her ilk cannot accept, if only because it might imply that they themselves should clear out of the UK, is that mass immigration is, ultimately, “white genocide” by replacement of real British (i.e. white) people by blacks, browns and others.
He's no different to you: another foreign invader with a massive chip on their shoulder and an even greater inferiority complex. You hate this nation and its people, but are happy to reap its benefits.
— DeAndre DeShawn DeWilliams (@PaddyThePinko) March 1, 2019
Here we see some reaction to Ash Sarkar’s and Owen Jones’s doormatting for the Jewish lobby…
Seems that “someone” sees a vacancy in the msm-approved “licensed Bolshevik” slot previously occupied by Owen Jones (usually by Owen Jones; sometimes Laurie Penny or others). That way, the msm can say, “look! We are open to all shades of opinion, even radical and revolutionary ones!”, while in fact only inviting the kind of people who are in reality completely harmless to the ZOG/NWO System. Non-white or Jewish faux-rebels. White social-nationalists are, of course, banned…
Update, 20 July 2019
A late entrant, a comedienne (for the brainwashed, that’s “comedian”, apparently…), of whom I have never heard but who I am sure is very proud to have 130K Twitter followers (and I am sure at least a few dozen regularly read her tweets…). She believes in “anti-fascist action” and intimidating anyone standing up for free speech.
Prize for the first person who tries to take issue to supporting anti fascist action. The prize is a little mute. That’s right, silencing and no platforming you! Boooooooo! Scary!!!!!
and, quelle surprise, she has been contracted at various times for those present gravediggers of culture, Channel 4 (usually a gravedigger) and the BBC (sometimes a gravedigger).
…from the Independent, reporting on beach patrols at Dover; all too typical of the sort of persons now prominent in “Labour” and what is left of the trade unions:
“Riccardo La Torre, firefighter and Eastern Region Secretary of the Fire Brigade Union, branded the coast patrol “despicable” and said: “These have-a-go, racist vigilantes have no place in any kind of enforcement or emergency activities and will only serve to make conditions and tensions worse.”
So “Riccardo La Torre” (que?), a regional secretary of the Fire Brigade Union, thinks that migrant invaders from Africa and the Middle East are “working class people”, who are “trying to get to safety”?!
Safety from, er, France? There you have in a nutshell, the craziness that is much of “Labour” now. Alien migrant-invaders are “working class people”, who should be allowed to occupy the UK at will (and be subsidized too)!
Note particularly the fag-end “Marxism”, trying to shoehorn the facts into some 1980s polytechnic back-of-postcard Marxism-Leninism.
This evening, I watched a show called something like “The Real Marigold Hotel”, in which four elderly once-“celebrities” went to a country (in this case, Cuba) in order to see what facilities might be available for retired people. As such, as a “documentary”, it was very superficial and lacking depth, though entertaining. What interested me was the society in general.
The Cuba –actually just Havana– shown (and I have never been there, though I am quite well acquainted with its history of the past century and, in the manner of Sarah Palin, have glimpsed it from the air and from the sea) was in fact largely the stereotype: old American cars in pastel pink and blue, decrepit but charming colonial mansions, palm trees etc.
The old people went to cultural classes and talked to Cubans in parks. It struck me anew that any society is a package: Cuba has some culture (both European and its own mixture incorporating the Caribbean and African, as well as that of the USA.
The Havana shown was one where the parks were (on the face of it) safe to visit, the people well-educated (one or two Cubans carefully making the point that their good education had been free, as were the classes available to the elderly).
Most people know that the Cuban healthcare system is also very good, both in relative and absolute terms. On the other hand, and as the TV programme noted, the Internet is tightly controlled, requires a card (no doubt traceable..) and is mostly only available in “wi-fi” areas such as certain parks; not so many have home Internet connection.
It is perhaps pointless to reiterate what most of us know in terms of the Cuban police state (which –in all the documentary films I have ever seen– is so pervasive that it is invisible: you never see the hand of the State in plain sight, though it is there all right).
So there you have the Cuban package: low crime rate (supposedly), no obvious disorder, at least some rather polite, cultured citizens, good education and healthcare etc (one Cuban did say that it was better before the supportive Soviet Union collapsed), as well as a certain charm.
As against that, a socialist state which controls the news and Internet tightly, imprisons dissidents for years (not to mention the large number who, in the late 1950s and 1960s, were just shot); a socialized economy which (leaving aside the effect of American embargo) was and largely is hopelessly inefficient at providing consumer goods. Travel restrictions, too.
Let us take a different case. The German Reich in the 1930s was intolerant of dissidents too, though it was far more tolerant than was the Soviet Union under Stalin or, indeed, Cuba under Fidel.
The National Socialist state imprisoned some dissidents or placed them in concentration camps such as Dachau (though few now know that many served short sentences, such as 3 months, there, and were not there indefinitely). Others were encouraged or more or less forced out of the country. There was a generally militarized ethos. How could a state both German and quasi-socialist be anything else?
In the Reich, there was state interference in culture (though, again, far less than, say, in the Soviet Union). Consumer production was given a lower priority than rearmament (“Guns Before Butter”), though large projects for the benefit of the people were also pushed into the foreground: the Autobahnen; the VW “people’s car”; the 1936 Olympics; a huge programme of educational and cultural events; the Kraft durch Freude [“Strength through Joy”] programme of Canary Islands cruises and Baltic beach holidays for the people (at a time when, in the UK, most people who had a holiday at all were corralled into poky Blackpool guest houses…); better nutrition for young people, too.
The National Socialist Reich was hugely beneficial for most Germans, certainly compared to what existed in the Weimar period. The Reich solved the inflation problem, the unemployment problem, the decadence problem and, yes, what it termed “the Jewish question”.
In the UK at the same time, there was greater ostensible “freedom”: elections every 5 years, the freedom to eat daily at the Ritz or at the Savoy Grill (if one had the funds..), no obvious book censorship (though, behind the scenes, there was much, not least via the Jewish element, even then). There was officialtheatre and cinema censorship (via the Lord Chamberlain’s office) and there was also, of course, grinding poverty (especially outside the South East), and a very repressive justice and prison system; not to mention the pervasive class system and its inequities.
No state, no political system is “perfect”. All have flaws, and all (most, at least) have benefits (though what might be the benefits of living in, say, North Korea or the Congo might be disputed). The aim can only be to do the best with what is available at the material time. We take everything as a package, as a whole.
I had no intention of writing about Cuba or Castro following the recent death of “Fidel”. However, the public and mass media reaction, much of it an outpouring of adulation and “me-too” faux-liberal compromise, has impelled me to write.
There is no doubt that Cuba before Castro was corrupt and, for many, poor. Before Castro there was Batista and before Batista, Prio (Carlos Prio Socarras), of whom the British historian Hugh Thomas wrote, memorably, in his mammoth history of the country, that he “fell like a rotten fruit, full of its own corruption.” Prío himself later said of his presidency: “They say that I was a terrible president of Cuba. That may be true. But I was the best president Cuba ever had.”[see Arthur M. Schlesinger, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House. New York: Houghton Mifflin (2002) p 216].
Prio was in fact someone who tried to keep to constitutional proprieties and it was his decision not to act extra-judicially which allowed the harsher figure of Batista to seize power in 1952, Prio himself having been elected (by free and contested election) in 1948.
Cuba in the 1950s was sometimes described as somewhere between a Latin American country and a detached, poorer, part of the United States, the latter for long its effective suzerain.
It would be easier to make a quick judgment of Castro’s rule had the United States not (and typically) engaged in ham-fisted great-power and quasi-colonialist geopolitics over the island. Those American interventions continue to muddy the waters: attempts to assassinate Castro, the Bay of Pigs “invasion” of 1961; above all, the partial embargo (which Cuba called a “blockade”) imposed initially in 1960.
No-one can say for sure whether Cuba would be much different had it had the chance to trade freely with the USA, its neighbour and natural main trading partner. Probably not much. Venezuela is another and more recent example of the inability of a Latin American socialist economy to perform adequately for long.
The bien-pensant “usual suspects” in the UK (the absurd Tariq Ali, Ken Livingstone, Jeremy Corbyn etc) are now saying that the Castro dictatorship was sort-of acceptable because Cuba had good education and good medical services. On that basis, they should be very kind indeed to German National Socialism, which provided the same and in fact far more (and with far less repression, in reality).
In fact, long before the Soviet subsidy disappeared, Havana was falling to pieces, as were the Cuban roads and railways. I myself had fleeting and peripheral contact with Cuba, otherwise seen by me only from the sea (between Cuba and the Bahamas) and the air (flying over Cuba between Tampa, Florida and Grand Cayman).
I was asked, when a practising barrister in London circa 1995, to help a scientific start-up based at Porton Down, Wiltshire, the high-security biological warfare facility, then recently partly-privatized. A small company of scientists had a bacterium which turned biomass into fuel (unscientific me calling it the turning of straw into gold). I thought of Cuba with its sugar-cane detritus, lack of fuel and high technical-education levels. Unfortunately, the Cuban Embassy in London did not respond, unlike the Ukrainian: I visited Porton Down with the then Ukrainian Ambassador, Mr. Komisarenko [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serhiy_Komisarenko]. Nothing came of that in the end, but it seems that, in more recent years, a company called Havana Energy, headed by ex-Labour Party MP Brian Wilson, has been producing energy that way in Cuba. The Cuban Embassy’s unresponsiveness told me all I needed to know about the Cuban bureaucracy: unalert, lethargic, useless, bearing in mind the country’s crying need for fuel.
Since the early 1990s, Cuba has gradually been moving towards a capitalist economy. No doubt that process will continue. Eventually, some kind of greater rapprochement with the USA will happen.
In this blog post, I am more interested in the puerile reaction of the kind of people in the UK who are letting off Castro on human rights and economic efficiency because Cubans have a health service and a school system. Jeremy Corbyn has excelled himself in ignorant misunderstanding. He just digs himself deeper with every statement.
The mass media and in particular the BBC is, as one might expect, doing its bit to eulogize about Castro, saying that he “turned a small island into a major force in world affairs.” Where does one start in unpacking such nonsense?
The reaction to Castro’s death tells me something else: those in the UK who think themselves “socialist” are willing to turn a blind eye to historical, political and economic realities so long as the label is right.
Ian Robert Millard 